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Saturday, January 12, 2013

New life for old shades

Ok, so I actually did this back in November..or early December. An idea came to me while I was putting some old, hand me down, plaid Christmas shades on my dining room chandelier. I thought , how yucky these light shades are getting. The plastic on the inside is yellow and not at all festive like the fun plaid outside. See!

I was sure that somewhere I had seen a table lampshade or pendant light shade that was shiny chrome like on the inside. I thought to myself, hmmm. that would be nice to have, might bounce some light around and make it brighter in here. I decided that a project was in order so I tried to think of what I could do to make these yellowed shades shiny on the inside. I thought of a few dumb ideas before I decided on what to do.
Apparently I don't have pictures of the process, but really you don't need them. Get yourself some metallic paint and paint the entire inside of the shade. Not the metal prongs though..duh. I used silver because I thought it would look best. My chandi is brushed nickle. When the paint dried I mixed up some Martha Stewart glitter (love that junk!) in with some Mod Podge. I used a glossy Podge and the color of my glitter is called "White Gold". Its silver with a hint of gold. Now cover all that silver you just painted with a couple layers of the Podge / glitter mix. Let it dry and admire the awesome sparklyness of it all.

Here it is with the lights down low.

Ok, well... it didn't brighten anything up. In fact, it made it darker, but looking up from my dinner plate and seeing all those sparkles sure made me happy. Best of all, I used what I already had and all that I had to put money out for was a bottle of craft paint. Cheap!